Solutions S1 Ep10: Creating the IT Professionals that Healthcare Needs - featuring Geoff Blanding of Optimum Healthcare IT

Healthcare organizations face many talent-related challenges that IT roles can manage in the evolving digital-oriented path of health systems. In this episode, Geoff Blanding, Optimum's Executive Vice President of Optimum CareerPath & Implementation Services, talks about said challenges and how the CareerPath Program seeks to recruit, train and place healthcare IT entry-level employees.

Hiring Healthcare IT professionals come with costs, experience, and availability challenges. Optimum CareerPath prioritizes training, diversity, and aptitude to bring down barriers and ease IT vacancies with new, strong candidates. Students of the program attend a three-month boot camp where they learn about healthcare technology and are placed within the program’s client organizations as employees.

Tune in to this episode to listen about Optimum CareerPath and how it’s relieving IT talent challenges in healthcare!

About Geoff Blanding:

Geoff Blanding serves as the Executive Vice President at Optimum Healthcare IT. As an experienced healthcare IT leader, Geoff helps organizations define and execute their IT strategies. He brings significant experience leading more than 30 Epic clients through their EHR implementations. As an interim CIO for a 250-bed specialty hospital system, Geoff understands first-hand the challenges healthcare organizations face. Before joining the Optimum team, Geoff was an Epic implementation and product director. His background includes experience with IT merger and acquisition due diligence and leading engineering, product, and technical services teams.

Things You’ll Learn:

• Optimum CareerPath is a program that seeks to recruit new entrants into healthcare information technology, train them in a thorough three-month boot camp, and place them as entry-level employees after graduating with a technical certification.
• It is essential to avoid bias and have diversity represented when you're working with AI and machine learning datasets that you might be developing.
• The job market for healthcare IT professionals is in high demand but faces many challenges like sky-high attrition, vacancies, and wages.
• When it comes to telehealth, technology isn’t a complicated issue, but the adoption of it by physicians and end-users.
• CareerPath is looking at aptitude and intelligence drive, among other soft skills more than experience as they believe talent training is underrated as a solution to I.T. vacancies in healthcare.

Resources:

Connect with Geoff Blanding by writing to [email protected]

Follow Geoff Blanding on LinkedIn 

Follow Optimum CareerPath on LinkedIn 

Discover the Optimum CareerPath Website